VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO 1 ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO 2 ARROW VIDEO CONTENTS 4 7 Cast and Crew ARROW Pom Poms and Politics (2016) 20 by Cullen Gallagher About the Restoration ARROW 3 VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO CAST AND CREW ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO Ron HajekRainbeaux • Ric SmithCarrott • •Colleen Jason SommersCamp • Rosanne • Ian Sander Katon StarringA Jack Jo Johnston Hill Film ARROW ARROWalso starring VIDEO Jack Denton • John Quade • Bob Minor VIDEO with Mae Mercer And George Wallace director of photography ARROW Alfred Taylor, ARROW VIDEO edited by Mort Tubor William Castleman & Willam Loose A.R.P.S. music by Robinsonproduction Boyce designed& B.B. Neel by Jane Witherspoon & Betty Conkey ARROW VIDEOwritten by ARROW produced by John Prizer directed by Jack Hill ARROW VIDEO 4 ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW 5 VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW POM POMS AND POLITICS VIDEO by Cullen Gallagher Romancing – and romanticising – the modern girl has been a preoccupation with American cinema from its inception. The first two decades of cinema saw numerous butterfly and serpentine dancers wiggling across the screen (and often these short films were hand- coloured to accentuate their alluring, scintillating, and fantastic qualities). The 1910s saw ARROW hordes of bathing beauties invading the screen (thank you, Mack Sennett); the 1920s had VIDEO their flappersVIDEO and vamps, while the 1930s had chorus girls and gold diggers; Betty Grable and other pin-ups inspired troops during the 1940s; beat girls, bombshells and femme fatales were the ‘it’ girls of the 1950s; and the 1960s began with beach babes and ended with The Stewardesses (1969). While inspired by real-life social and gender trends, these screen-types overemphasised the glamour and sexuality of the characters as part of their tantalising fictionalisation of modern life. VIDEO ARROW The 1970s gave birth to a newVIDEO fad – the cheerleader film. Just asNight Nurse (1931) and Ladies They Talk About (1933) purportedly pulled back the veils on all-female domains (nursing and prisons, respectively), the cheerleader films were far more fantasy than reality. Roughly a dozen unrelated films, the genre nicely straddled the decade, beginning in 1970 and seemingly running out of pep by 1980. The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) is the apex of the series. Not only is it the best-made (in terms of overall production, casting, script and direction), but also one of the only ones to bear an authorial stamp (Hill’s aesthetic is clearly ARROW ARROWpresent throughout). Furthermore, it is also the most overtly socio-political of the bunch, a VIDEO film calling attention to – and criticising – the voyeuristicVIDEO eroticism in which the other films revel. Throughout Hill’s career, he proved to be the thinking man’s exploitation director, one who managed to deliver the visceral pleasures audiences desired while also creating a timely, thought-provoking, and culturally progressive movies. The Swinging Cheerleaders is a movie that is very much in dialogue with its time, and as such it helps to understand the cinematic and cultural context that gave birth to the film. ARROW VIDEO ARROWCheerleaders were the Ziegfeld girls of the ’70s – all-American icons of glamour,VIDEO national pride, and gender perfection. Sidelines had become the chorus line for a new generation of performers. While it is hard to definitively explain the phenomenon at this particular moment in time, there were certainly a couple of cultural shifts that certainly influenced it. ARROW VIDEO ARROW 6 7 ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW VIDEO 8 ARROW VIDEO ARROW ARROW 9 VIDEO VIDEO ARROW VIDEO Foremost was the rise in the visibility of the sport, itself. Cheerleading in the United States genre and its narrative and stylistic touchstones was The Cheerleaders (1973), a racy began in the late nineteenth century as an all-male sport. Women athletes weren’t allowed rah-rah-rah in which the big game is sabotaged when the girls jump the other team’s until the 1920s, and it wasn’t until the 1940s that they began to dominate it (with the bones, zapping them of all their spirit. Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976), a satire on men awayARROW in World War II, it was up to the women to take over not only on the field but VIDEOan already satirical genre, takes things to the point of lunacy – two students rob their on the sidelines, too). While the first professional cheering squad in the National Football classroom (teacher included) of their drugs (teacher included), there’s a chase through League was in 1948 (the Philadelphia Eagles), only two more teams joined in the 1950s a gigantic iron dinosaur, and David Hasselhoff plays a basketball player named ‘Boner’ (Indianapolis Colts and Green Bay Packers), and it wasn’t until the 1960s that the majority – but in between getting laid the cheerleaders do manage to thwart a plot to steal their of NFL teams had official cheerleaders. A 1965 profile inLife of WWII vet-turned-cheering high school’s land. (Also of note, the film was co-written, co-produced, and photographed coach Bill Horan brought the sport into living rooms all across the country. ABC’s Wide World by future experimental auteur Nathaniel Dorsky.) The Pom Pom Girls (1976) is the neo- of Sports first aired in 1961 and, under the tutelage of director Andy Sidaris, the camera realist cheerleading film, stylistically somewhere between Roberto Rossellini and Richard frequently turned from the gameARROW to the girls on the sidelines. In Seconds to Play (1976), a Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), refreshingly less of a saucy spoof than it is a haze VIDEO documentary that goes behind the program, Sidaris can be heard over the radio ordering of high VIDEOschool horniness, pranks, and hijinks. Cult auteur Greydon Clark followed up Black his cameraman for “front shots of those broads”. Mary Ellen Hanson’s Go! Fight! Win!: Shampoo (1976) with Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977), a very funny lampoon of two trends Cheerleading in American Culture (1995) cites a Los Angeles Magazine article that says, obviously referenced in the title. Cheering Section (1977) was a winner-takes-all-the-girls “[Sidaris] is to cheerleaders what Hugh Hefner has been to centrefolds”. Sidaris would soon plot, while Cheerleaders Beach Party (1978) was a throwback to The Cheerleaders’ seduce- leave sports and focus on making bosom-centric independent action spoofs. the-other-team scheme. In Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend (1979, aka The Great American Girl Robbery), three cheer teams on their way to a competition are kidnapped by terrorists and Off the field, another industry was also going through massive changes. While the Production held for ransom. And there was Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (1979), a TV movie in which VIDEO Code had been strangling Hollywood since 1934 (evenARROW though it started in 1930, no-one Jane Seymour goes undercoverVIDEO to report on the titular team (borrowing the central plot heeded it too seriously until ’34), its dominance began to wane in the 1950s. In 1952, from The Swinging Cheerleaders). Hardcore pornography also jumped on the cheerleader Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle (L’amore, 1948) was granted freedom of speech rights by bandwagon, as evinced by Pro-Ball Cheerleaders (1979, aka Football Cheerleader) – the the Supreme Court, opening the doors for filmmakers to begin pushing the bounds, and premise is self-explanatory – and Debbie Does Dallas (1978), among the most famous and slowly but surely they did. Language, violence, and sexuality blossomed, bloomed, and financially successfully adult films of all time. boomed on-screen, until finally, in 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America adopted a letter rating system started to categorise movies: G (general audiences), M (parental Despite its suggestive title, The Swinging Cheerleaders actually bears very little in common guidance suggested, later changed to GP and, ultimately, PG), R (restricted), and X (no one with these other movies. Whereas most of them use the sport as a pretext for sleazy ARROW VIDEOunder 17). Meanwhile, the rise of drive-ins, as well as more lurid, urban cinemasARROW (such as shenanigans, Hill’s interest is less prurient and moreVIDEO political. The film began as an idea those on New York City’s famed 42nd Street), engendered an audience looking for more from producer John Prizer, who had the title, and recruited Hill, who just had back-to- sensational forms of cinema. back hits with Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), to direct. Inspired by the Watergate investigation, the plot revolves around Kate (Jo Johnston), a student at Mesa State And therein lies the birth of the cheerleader film. University, who is writing her journalism term paper on cheerleading, which she views as “the most exploitive, demeaning activity on campus.” Going undercover, she auditions for Kicking off the cycle was a 1970 West German sex farce called Mir hat es immer Spaß the squad and joins the three head girls, Andrea (Rainbeaux Smith), Lisa (Rosanne Katon), ARROW gemachtVIDEO (How Did a Nice Girl Like You Get Into This Business?) or, as it was released in ARROWand Mary Ann (Colleen Camp). As part of her research, she must move out of theVIDEO apartment the US, The Naughty Cheerleader – the fact that Barbi Benton’s globetrotting, bed-hopping she shares with her politically radical boyfriend, Ron (Ian Sander), and move into a dorm factotum is only a cheerleader for a brief minute in the beginning only goes to highlight with the other girls.